Far Bank Curse of the crayfish
Oversized, oversexed and over here – can anything stop the march of the American signal crayfish, asks Dom Garnett
N the glorious world I of local news here in Devon, it’s not every day you get a headline of terror.
Escaped cattle and bad weather are favourite topics – or there was the front-page splash about a fire that simply gave up and went out when nobody came to tackle it.
Reports of invasive crayfish in new territory on the River Exe and Somerset Levels, though, are the stuff of nightmares.
Never will we see a headline along the lines of ‘River Exe Declared Free of Crayfish’ – it just doesn’t happen. The buggers are just too good at burrowing, hiding and scavenging their way into an invincible position.
As with the Himalayan balsam problem, it appears that damage limitation is about as good as it gets. Because, like those B-movie monsters of old, it appears that even bullets, flame throwers and tanks cannot stop the crays.
We may be holding out for some sort of mad genius, usually portrayed in the same films as chap in a white lab coat whose wooden acting and bald head marks him out as a boffin.
Actually, there is a certain deranged genius to the current anti-crayfish strategy in Devon.
Signal crays are highly territorial, apparently, with each patch of riverbed having a large, dominant male in residence that breeds with the females. Find this nippy cretin and remove his (ahem!) armoured testicles and you also remove his ability to produce equally nasty and nippy kids. Except that here’s the catch – it appears that if you chop off the crown jewels of a crayfish (I bet that was never in any EA worker’s job description) they grow back! I’ll give you a moment to digest the full horror and despair of that statement.
Yes, it appears we’re back to the B-movie monster script, with no solution beyond nuclear force or making boiled crayfish our national delicacy. Actually, that latter idea may not be so much of a joke after all. At present, there are woefully low numbers of trappers, partly because it’s a headache to get the paperwork. But suppose we allow more folks to take Mr Cray and his mates to market?
The fear is that this is how crays move between waters in the first place. But seeing as this is happening anyway, why not let responsible professionals literally make a killing from crayfish?
It’s a debate that will continue to rumble on, but perhaps the one silver lining is that crayfish are tasty. And a wider form of damage control might at least serve up some tasty table fare and provide some folks with employment.
At least until we find a way to stop their nuts growing back.
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